Re: The "Social Web" vs the "Fediverse"

> On Dec 26, 2023, at 17:32, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
> As far as I know, there is no way to link, in a generic way, from a web page to the user's preferred ActivityPub service. Today, it seems like one would have to provide links which are specific to implementations (e.g. Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc.). Ideally, one could have an ActivityPub link that would work with whatever a user's preferred ActivityPub service might be. Has anyone implemented such a thing? How does it work? Would it need to involve a browser extension? (i.e to store the preferred instance, etc.?) If so, could we create a browser extension standard for adding an appropriate link to any "Share" menu? (Note: An extension specific to the BBC would be trivial, a more general extension would be challenging if there wasn't some standard that web publishers could use to indicate "AP share link goes here..." That would be something like a menu option with "display: none" and a well-known name that an extension could find and rewrite to link as appropriate.)
I believe something like this is sorely needed. We had this discussion before ...

Also, for those of us who are very much concerned by potential embrace-and-extend-and-take-over, functionality like this that that provides real benefit to users but isn’t standardized (nor being worked on) would be a “perfect” avenue for somebody to “extend” the standard and take it elsewhere. Nefariously or nicely, the result goes in the same direction.

Functionality that somebody reasonably wants but isn’t standardized by necessity becomes a non-standard “extend”; as a standards organization, we should anticipate those needs and preemptively standardize to avoid the “extend” IMHO.

> A web site publisher, like the BBC, is likely to want to be able to see ActivityPub posts that refer to their content. But, to do this, there would need to have some kind of search capability that allowed publishers to find such references. (e.g. Like Twitter's support for searching for URLs in their search bar. Use this link to see many Tweets linking to the BBC story below <https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-europe-67821515&src=typed_query>.) Of course, this raises all kinds of issues with the Social Web since there are so many people who argue against indexing of Social Web content... Alternatively, Social Web systems might implement a "ping-back" to notify sites when they are referenced in posts. Personally, I would prefer a search-based solution since that would be more generally useful.
> I believe that user's experience of sites like the BBC would be enhanced if, whenever they are viewing content on the BBC site, they were able to see a list of all Social Web posts referencing that site. This could be implemented easily if the search capability mentioned above were available. Ideally, users would be able to filter the list of posts to include only those from those they follow and/or their followers, etc.
Great useful potential additions to the protocol stack as we have it so far. Also worth working on IMHO.

Cheers,



Johannes.


Johannes Ernst

Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/>
Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>